Week #1

It’s the first Friday of 2025 and my first weeknote of the year. This year I’ve decided to give weeknoting a serious go, to share what I’m working on, what’s going on in my life and share stuff I’ve stumbled upon.

This week at work

I’m going to try a new thing with this weeknote; sharing a rough Kanban board from my week.

    To do

  • Bill briefing
  • Business case updates
  • Scheme recognition meeting
  • Q3 roadmap review
  • Q4 roadmapping

    Doing

  • Bill briefing prep
  • FOI
  • Blog posts on our register

    Done

  • FOI
  • Catching up on Christmas emails (!)
  • Blog post on certification

It’s been a very short week – I’ve only been in on Thursday and Friday, following a mostly restful Christmas break. Most of the team aren’t back to work until Monday, so it’s been a mercifully quiet couple of days but I haven’t had much time to do anything significant.

Never ending emails

Somehow, I’ve returned to no fewer than 80 unread emails. How does that even happen over Christmas?! Anyway, I’ve cleared the backlog… mostly.

Freedom of Information

Some of those emails related to Freedom of Information Act requests. I am all for being transparent about what government is up to – I passionately believe in open-policy making, after all – but FOIs are just so irritating.

It’s not the requests themselves that are the problem; it’s that they prompt the wrong behaviours. In each of the 3 FOIs I’ve been dealing with this week, the requestors would likely have gotten a better, clearer answer if they’d just written a letter to us asking what we’re doing. But they didn’t do that; they made an FOI request, which prompts a merry-go-round of process that is mostly pointless and benefits no one.

One of the FOIs has been dispatched with; two more to resolve next week.

Blogging

I’ve published a new blog post on the “Enabling digital identity” blog. This one attempts to explain, in straightforward terms, how we’re using certification to build trust.

I’ve also been working on 2 other blog posts, due for publication soon, that explain some other elements of the programme. I need to wait for some other people to feedback and contribute on those before they’re ready though! You can subscribe to the blog to be notified by email when we post them.

Bill stuff

Next week, we’ll be briefing some members of the House of Lords on our legislation and how our policy works. So I’ve been doing a little prep work ahead of that during this week.

I like doing this kind of Parliament-facing work; it’s important that parliamentarians get to engage in the detail with the people doing the work, so that our wider democratic processes work.

Next week

Aside from the briefing, next week I hope to turn my attention to Spending Review preparations and that means updating our business case. I also have a meeting with UKAS to discuss our latest certification scheme iteration and their feedback prior to it being formally recognised; which is likely to generate a little bit of work of its own!

Outside of work

Goals

I’ve set myself some new goals for 2025 this week and written up a blog post about it. Fingers crossed I can stick to these slightly less ambitious goals; day 3 and I’m still on track so far!

Gaming

Continuing my latest fad I mean, hobby, I’ve taken delivery of some new Game Boy flash cartridges this week, which will allow me to create backups of aging Game Paks which have seen better days. One of them is a dud – so that’s going to have to go back – but the rest seem to work brilliantly.

I’ve kicked off a replay of the Plucky Squire on PlayStation this week. I really enjoyed playing this through last year, and I’m going back through it to pick up the Platinum trophy.

Website updates

I’ve been tinkering with my website again over Christmas and New Year; adding some new designs for my games pages. I’ll write more about that separately.

Star Trek

I’ve started a rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager for about the millionth time. No matter how great the new Trek shows get, I can’t stop myself from going back to Voyager, Deep Space 9 and The Next Generation for some comfort TV.

Found interesting

Having read Russell’s book – Doing interesting – last year, I’ve started to collect stuff that I found interesting in an app on my phone (Reeder, if you’re interested). Borrowing some inspiration from Neil’s weeknotes, I’m going to share some of it here.